Restricted attention to social cues in schizophrenia patients.

Restricted attention to social cues in schizophrenia patients. Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci. 2016 Jun 15; Authors: Nikolaides A, Miess S, Auvera I, Müller R, Klosterkötter J, Ruhrmann S Abstract Deficits of psychosocial functioning are a robust finding in schizophrenia. Research on social cognition may open a new avenue for the development of effective interventions. As a correlate of social perceptive information processing deficits, schizophrenia patients (SZP) show deviant gaze behavior (GB) while viewing emotional faces. As understanding of a social environment requires gathering complex social information, our study aimed at investigating the gaze behavior of SZP related to social interactions and its impact on the level of social and role functioning. GB of 32 SZP and 37 healthy control individuals (HCI) was investigated with a high-resolution eye tracker during an unguided viewing of 12 complex pictures of social interaction scenes. Regarding whole pictures, SZP showed a shorter scanpath length, fewer fixations and a shorter mean distance between fixations. Furthermore, SZP exhibited fewer and shorter fixations on faces, but not on the socially informative bodies nor on the background, suggesting a cue-specific abnormality. Logistic regression with bootstrapping yielded a model including two GB parameters; a subsequent ROC curve analysis indicated an excellent ability of group discrimination (AUC .85). Face-related GB a...
Source: European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience - Category: Psychiatry Tags: Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci Source Type: research